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This collection has a "show" and "tell" quality to it, in that, the "Lyrical" essays are mostly filled with descriptive impressions Camus makes as he observes and responds to the world while the "Critical" essays are more associated with his need to express his compulsion to tether his ideas down and attempt to refine and articulate his own arguments, even as he subsumes another's work.

I prefer the latter to the former.

While there is great beauty in how Camus sees the world and his impressions of his environment, we as readers, also are aware of a man who does not yet know himself or how he thinks. Yes, it's interesting to see how a person, such as Camus, looks at the world which would later inform how he responds to the world, but this is also a Camus that I was not aware of -- one who leans more into bigotry, bitterness, over-sensitivity, self-pitying, prejudicial and one who is invariably looking at the world through eyes of unacknowledged privilege. Yet these are the grains that will eventually lead to the man; it's just these lyrical essays only offer the one side, the unacknowledged or unaware side of Camus -- which is fine, but grating to plow through before his more revelatory contemplation.

Camus' critical essays are far better: not only do they often -- not always -- recognise his own limitations, it is made very clear in almost every essay in this section that he is desperately trying to work out his own ideas through understanding others. Reading a man's acknowledgement of his own ignorance, his identifying with others, his rejection of certain principles even when he, as yet, cannot articulate his own ideas clearly, is tremendously gratifying. Thought is trying; it requires patience even when your own flawed and limited brain does not yet have the language to adequately express it: Camus' critical essays offer this for his readers.

So despite the lyrical essays' limitations, once I finished the critical essays, I saw how necessary they were; for it is important to show a man, flawed, a man who responds to the world by reacting to it, for a man to be shown as so tragically ordinary first, to show we, all of us, may be capable of envisioning a world in which we feel some semblance of identity and purpose even in the face of such absurdity. This world may be absurd to Camus, but he is nevertheless charmed by it.